The ExxonMobil Corp. earned $36 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, more than doubling its 2019 revenues, which Chairman-CEO Darren Woods notes accompanied the acquisition of the Denbury Resources and Pioneer Natural Resources companies.
“Denbury, which closed in November, provides opportunities to profitably accelerate our low-carbon solutions business with a compelling end-to-end customer decarbonization offer,” Woods said from the Houston suburb of Spring. “Pioneer, which is expected to close in the second quarter, will further differentiate our advantaged upstream portfolio.
“The synergies will create significant shareholder value and accelerate Pioneer’s net-zero ambitions by 15 years to 2035.”
Woods said ExxonMobil’s strategy, introduced in 2018, brought a 15-percent return on capital employed and led the energy industry in earnings and cash flow growth, total shareholder distributions and total shareholders’ returns since 2019.
“In 2023 we made significant advances in a number of innovative solutions,” he said. “We entered the lithium business where we see an opportunity to supply approximately one million electric vehicles per year by 2030.
“With economically advantaged production, lithium has a much smaller environmental impact than today’s supply. In the carbon capture and storage space we recently completed the construction of a pilot plant to further develop a unique proprietary technology which has the potential to significantly lower the cost of direct air capture.”
Another addition was the Proxima thermoset resin with a high value in use for coatings, infrastructure, automotive parts and wind power made from the low-value components used in gasoline.
“We took a further step in reducing cost, leveraging scale and improving effectiveness with the formation of three new centralized organizations, global supply, trading, and global business solutions,” Woods said. “This change provides additional opportunities to grow deep expertise across a broad portfolio of critical business capabilities.
“Today we’re convinced that no other company can match the depth and breadth of development opportunities that ExxonMobil offers. It’s no surprise that for the 11th year in a row we were recognized as the most attractive U.S. employer in the industry for engineering students.”
Woods said ExxonMobil this year will invest $23 billion to $25 billion to grow its portfolio of advantaged low cost of supply assets, further shift its product mix toward higher value, higher margin performance products and reduce emissions, both its own and that of others.
“Our plan also continues to reduce costs to achieve $15 billion in structural cost savings through 2027,” he said. “We have opportunities to enhance supply chain efficiency, further improve maintenance and turnarounds, modernize data management and simplify business processes.
“In low-carbon solutions we’ll continue the integration of Denbury and look to add additional customers to our U.S. Gulf Coast network. As we noted during the corporate plan update in December we’re now pursuing more than $20 billion of lower emission opportunities, evenly split between reducing our own emissions and reducing third-party emissions.”
Woods said ExxonMobil’s upstream portfolio will be further transformed when it closes on the transaction with Pioneer.
“By combining the capabilities of our two companies and leveraging the advances we’ve made in technology we expect to recover more resource more efficiently with lower emissions,” he said.
Senior Vice President-Chief Financial Officer Kathy Mikells said using artificial intelligence, chat box and customer care centers provides better service and drives efficiency for the company.
“Bringing together our information technology organization with our engineering and research organization will further enhance how overall we as a technology company fundamentally tries to use technology to both drive efficiency and value in the business,” Mikells said.
